A German and Chinese partnership dedicated to sustainable building and renewable energy broke ground this week on a new eco-park in Qingdao. Located off the coast of the Yellow Sea, the eco-park will be a new city quarter for living and working that will be powered largely by renewable energy. The region is known for a higher than average solar resource and the community will aim to use as much solar energy as possible. Germany-based gmp Architekten is responsible for the master plan, which is supported by the German Society for Sustainable Building (DGNB) and Transsolar Consultants.

I don’t understand why researchers are not trying harder to crack better energy storage solutions. Instead, all the focus seems to be on finding new clean sources of energy. That’s important, of course, but if we could vastly improve energy storage we could presumably make do with the energy sources we already have? And intermittent renewables such as wind and solar would be so much more attractive.

BrightSource Energy is a leading solar thermal energy company. In California, it’s in the process of planning and building some of the largest solar thermal power plants in the world. (For more on its technology, see the last paragraph of this post. For more background, check out our BrightSource Energy page.)

Yesterday, the company announced that it is adding “its SolarPLUS thermal energy storage capability to three of its power purchase agreements with Southern California Edison (SCE).” It now has two solar thermal power plants scheduled to be finished and delivering energy in 2015, and three, with storage, scheduled to deliver electricity in 2016 and 2017. (And, BrightSource — with partners NRG Energy, Google, and Bechtel — are building a 126-megawatt plant for Southern California Edison at the Ivanpah solar project in southeast California).

With the storage, BrightSource solar power plants can deliver electricity to the grid consistently and into the evening hours. That makes the solar power more valuable because utilities pay more for power during peak hours, which continues past nightfall.

BrightSource’s solar tower technology generates steam from a field of mirrors called heliostats shining onto a tower. The steam is fed into a conventional turbine to generate electricity. After turning the turbine, the steam is condensed into water and fed back to the tower to be heated again.

The biggest hurdle to widespread implementation of solar power is the fact that the sun doesn’t shine constantly in any given place, so backup power systems are needed for nights and cloudy days. But a novel system designed by researchers at MIT could finally overcome that problem, delivering steady power 24/7.

The basic concept is one that has been the subject of much research: using a large array of mirrors to focus sunlight on a central tower. This approach delivers high temperatures to heat a substance such as molten salt, which could then heat water and turn a generating turbine. But such tower-based concentrated solar power (CSP) systems require expensive pumps and plumbing to transport molten salt and transfer heat, making them difficult to successfully commercialize — and they generally only work when the sun is shining.

El Hierro, the smallest and southern-most island of the Canaries, made headlines recently after it announced plans to become the world’s first island to eradicate its carbon footprint and run completely off 100% renewable energy sources. The Huffington Post reported how El Hierro will be powered by an 11.5 MW wind farm, 11.3 MW of hydroelectric power and a whole bunch of solar thermal collectors and grid-connected photovoltaics. The fact that oil will no longer be transported to this remote location alone will offset 18,200 tons of carbon dioxide. These are undeniably impressive statistics and the project represents a wonderful opportunity for Swiss-Swedish power giant, ABB. Plans call for this ambitious project to be completed by the end of 2011 and will cost $87 million. However there is one problem with the claim that El Hierro is “the world’s first renewable energy island” – it isn’t.

The Indian Minister of New & Renewable Energy, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, on July 1st, 2011 inaugurated a solar thermal cooling system at the Solar Energy Centre in Gurgaon in Haryana. Minister of Power, Shri Sushilkumar Shinde, was also present at inauguration of the solar cooling system for which India claims the world’s highest efficiency.

A typical solar thermal installation by Thermax Limited.

Triple effect absorption cooling technology

The new 100 kw Solar Air-Conditioning System due to the ministers works at 30% higher efficiency than the current available systems and has several unique features. It is based on the new triple effect absorption cooling technology. The system has indigenously built medium temperature high efficiency parabolic troughs for collection of solar energy and effective solar thermal energy storage in the form of Phase Change Materials.

Vapor absorption machine generates 7 °C chilled water

The present system will cater to air-conditioning needs of 13 rooms of Solar Energy Centre. To achieve this, 288 square meters of Solar Collector area has been installed which generates nearly 60 kW of
210 °C pressurized hot water. This heat is used in a vapor absorption machine to generate 7 °C chilled water which in turn circulates through the fan coil unit installed in the thirteen rooms. The major attraction of this system is that the hottest days have the greatest need for cooling and simultaneously, offer the maximum possible solar energy gain.
The system has been developed in joint collaboration by Solar Energy Centre with M/s Thermax Limited, Pune and is expected to meet the growing demand for air-conditioning in India in a highly efficient and cost effective way through use of direct solar energy.